‘My people!’ he proclaimed.
The High Priest, once Imperial Governor of this world, licked his lips as he bathed in the cheers rising to meet him. His was a solemn duty; to herald in a world free of Imperial taxation and tithe. A world under his rule, aided by the council of cardinals, known collectively as the Benevolence.
‘My people, hear my words!’ he continued. ‘We stand at the dawn of a new age of peace and prosperity! No more shall we hurl our faith and fortunes into the furnace of Imperial slavery. No more shall our world suffer alone, ignored by the Imperium of Man. No more shall we struggle through famine and civil war, led into folly by self-serving ministers appointed by distant Terra.’
Cyrus paused, waiting until the cheers died down before he continued. ‘This is the age of the Benevolence! The new faith! The Benevolence encircles us all, in hope and trust. Faith in one another! Faith in other worlds that have thrown off the same shackles! Shoulder to shoulder, we stand defiant against the oppression of the past!’
The crowd roared, as Cyrus had known it would. Already, they were chanting his name as their saviour, their saint.
‘Brothers and sisters, sons and daughters! We are free, united far from the reach of the hated False Emperor! I… I…’
He never finished the sentence. The fat man staggered, gripping the balcony’s railing. The Red Sentinels moved as one, their rifles up and panning for threats. The cheering from the crowd was drowned in confusion.
The huntress smiled as she watched. The timing had been perfect; the venom delivered the very moment this false prophet dared to decry the God-Emperor. The crowd had seen it. The hololithic image feeds had recorded it, so the whole planet had witnessed it. Now they knew the price of blasphemy and secession.
The digital weapon concealed on her gauntlet was only good for a single shot, one sliver-dart, rich with neurotoxin. The targeting laser was flashless, and easily powerful enough to pierce the heretic’s silk robes. She’d fired it right into his spine, and none of the Red Sentinels were any the wiser.
The High Priest tumbled forwards and he pitched over the balcony’s edge. He didn’t scream as he fell, for he was already dead.
The huntress smiled behind her faceless visor, moving with the other Red Sentinels, feigning panic and anger to mirror theirs. She disliked the bulky armour they wore, but the skin was a necessary one. The Sentinel she’d killed to acquire it had put up a reasonable fight – for an unaugmented human, at least.
The huntress made a show of scanning for enemy targets on balconies of adjacent buildings, relishing the panicked voices jabbering over the vox. In a matter of minutes, she would be able to leave this wretched gathering and make her way back through the city, in readiness to abandon this world forever.
She was already making her way to the double doors when the sun fell dark, and heavy engines whined behind her. The huntress turned, her eyes narrowed, her heart starting to beat faster.
Five shapes dropped from the sky. Armoured in massive suits of power armour, they thudded down onto the balcony. Flame and smoke retched from the thrust generators on their backs, and helms with painted skulls for faces watched her with unerring focus. Not the other Red Sentinels. Just her. These warriors had been waiting on the roof, knowing she would make her move.
Each of the figures raised a bolter clutched in dark gauntlets.
‘Assassin of the Callidus Temple,’ intoned one, his voice a growl through his helmet’s vox-caster. ‘We have come for you.’
There was no thought of fighting. The huntress turned and ran, preternatural agility blurring her form like quicksilver. Sentinel armour rained from her as she sprinted back through the palace, discarded as fast as she was able.
She heard them giving chase. The clanging thuds of ceramite boots on mosaic floors. The coughing bursts of jump packs breathing fire, propelling the warriors down the halls faster than the huntress could run. Bystanders, innocent or otherwise, cried out as her pursuers cut down anyone in their way.
She heard the throaty crashing of bolters, and weaved across the detonating ground where shells hit home. She leapt as she ran, knowing they were targeting her legs, seeking to bring her down by an explosive shell to the back of the knee.
One shell impacted on the huntress’s calf, but spun aside, deflected by her synthetic skin armour. Another exploded against the wall by her shoulder, sending chalky debris clattering over her face. Still, she ran.
When a shell finally struck home, it took her in the meat of the thigh. Despite years of pain resistance training and narcotic compounds introduced into her bloodstream to deaden her nerves, the agony was unrivalled. The huntress howled as she went down, her thigh reduced to nothing more than a ruin of hanging flesh and muscle stripped from the bloodstained, broken bone.
Spitting curses, she clawed herself forwards, vicious even in futility. She had enough of a lead to drag herself to her feet, and round the next corner in an awkward, limping run.
Her flight to safety lasted mere seconds. As she rounded the corner, shoving her way through a milling crowd of servants, two immense, dark forms brought her to the ground. Her muscles stung with chemical enhancement, straining against the armoured warriors pinning her to the floor. She went to draw her blade from her thigh sheath, only to scream in frustrated rage when she realised the scabbard and blade had been torn from her body when the exploding shell struck her leg. She yelled fresh curses as her reaching forearm was smashed under the boot of another traitorous warrior.
She writhed under their oppressive strength, losing control in her anger, not even realising her face was flowing into the visages of a dozen women she’d killed in the last two days. From above, she heard the leader of the warriors speak while his men held her down.
‘My name is Talos of the Night Lords Legion. And you are coming with me.’
The huntress opened her eyes, feeling them ripe with stinging tears. The first thing to grace her senses was pain, jagged and unfamiliar in its intensity. Everything below her spine ached with sickening pulses in time to her heartbeat.
Immediately, training took over from disoriented instinct. She had to learn her whereabouts, then escape. Nothing else mattered. Her vision focused, resolving the blurred gloom into a semblance of clarity.
The chamber was intentionally dark, kept that way by low-burning wall globes. With no furnishings beyond the table she lay upon, it had all the charm of a prison cell. The huntress tried to rise, but her limbs wouldn’t answer. She could barely even raise her head.
She became aware, at last, of rasping breath, with the teeth-aching rumble of active power armour.
‘Do not try to rise.’ The voice was the same rasping growl as before. ‘Your legs have been amputated, as have your arms below the elbows. You are conscious only because of chemical pain-inhibitors flushed into your bloodstream.’
The armoured figure came into view, stalking to the edge of the table. Its face was a battered war helm, the visage painted bone-white to resemble a human skull, and a rune from a filthy, forgotten language etched into its forehead. Across its breastplate, an Imperial eagle was ruined by ritual scarring, the holy aquila symbol no doubt profaned by the heretic warrior that wore it.
‘You will not escape this chamber,’ said the figure – Talos, she guessed. ‘You will never return to your temple. There is no fate for you beyond the walls of this cell, and so I grant you a choice, assassin. Tell us what we wish to know, and earn yourself a quick death, or tell us after we have subjected you to several hours of excruciation.’
The huntress spoke through blood-flecked lips, her voice a ghost of its former strength.
‘I will die before speaking secrets to a heretic.’
Even through the vox-crackle, the reply was tinged with amusement. ‘Everyone says that.’
‘Pain… pain is nothing to me,’ said the huntress.
‘Pain
is nothing to you when what remains of your body is flooded with inhibitor narcotics,’ replied Talos. ‘The interface nodes implanted along your spinal cord will change your perception of pain soon enough.’
‘I am Jezharra,’ she said defiantly, ‘daughter of the Callidus. You will get nothing from me, fallen one. Nothing but curses heaped upon your worthless life.’
Talos laughed.
‘Stronger souls than yours have cracked in our claws, assassin. No one resists. Do not make me do this.’
‘How did you know I would come?’
‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘I am a prophet of the Eighth Legion. In moments of affliction, I can see along the path of a future yet to come.’
‘Sorcery,’ spat Jezharra. ‘Black magic.’
‘Perhaps. But it worked, did it not?’
‘You think yourself cunning for arranging that ambush? For luring a daughter of the Callidus to this backwater world, and baiting the trap with a cult’s high priest?’
‘Cunning enough to have you here, at my mercy, with your arms and legs severed by my brothers’ chainblades.’
‘My death is meaningless,’ Jezharra sighed. ‘My life was lived in service to the Golden Throne, so do what you will. Agony will never twist me into a traitor.’
‘Then you have chosen,’ said Talos. ‘These are your final moments of sanity, released from pain. Enjoy them while you can.’
‘I am Jezharra, daughter of the Callidus. My mind is inviolate, my soul unbroken. I am Jezharra, daughter of the Callidus…’
The huntress grinned as she chanted the words. The warrior turned, addressing another presence in the room, a figure the bound assassin couldn’t see.
‘So be it. Excruciate her.’
Jezharra, the huntress, resisted for seventeen days. It was by far the longest any human had lasted under the Legion’s interrogation. When she broke at last, little remained of the woman she’d been, let alone the consummate killer.
She wheezed secrets from split lips, the words forming vapour in the chamber’s freezing air. Once she had said all she needed to say, she lay slack in her restraints, trying to summon the strength to beg for death.
‘The… Uriah System.’
‘Where in the Uriah System?’ asked Talos patiently.
‘Uriah… is a dying star. Temple is… on the planet… farthest from it. Three. Uriah… Three.’
‘What of the defences?’ pressed Talos.
‘Nothing in orbit. Nothing permanent. Local… local battlefleet patrols nearby.’
‘And on the surface?’
‘It… it is done,’ breathed the dying huntress. ‘Kill me…’
‘What defences are on the surface of Uriah Three?’ repeated Talos.
‘Nothing… Just my sisters. Fifty… fifty daughters of Callidus. A lone fortress-temple… in the mountains.’
‘Coordinates?’
‘Please…’
‘The coordinates, assassin,’ insisted Talos. ‘Then I will end this.’
‘Twenty-six degrees… Eighteen… forty-four… point fifty-six. The heart of the tundra. Seventy degrees… Twenty-three, forty-nine point sixty-eight.’
‘Is the temple shielded against orbital attack?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘And the hololithic recording is there?’
‘I… I saw it myself.’
‘Very well,’ said Talos.
The warrior drew a golden blade. Its craftsmanship was exquisite, forged in an age of inspiration long-forgotten by the Imperium. On a ship of ancient relics, this was by far the most revered. The Night Lord stepped closer to the husk on the apothecarion table.
‘Jezharra…’
The warrior let the assassin’s name hang in the air. With his free hand, he disengaged the seals of his helm, pulling the death-mask off with a serpentine hiss of venting air pressure. The assassin’s eyes were gone, taken from her in the interrogation, but she sensed what he had done in the way his voice changed.
‘Thank you,’ he said softly.
She spat at him before she died – one final act of defiance. In a way, it was hard not to admire her. But Talos’s blade fell, embedding itself in the table as the assassin’s head rolled free.
The warrior stood in the stinking chamber for an indeterminate number of heartbeats, before replacing his war helm. His vision drowned in the red wash of the eye lenses’ tactical display. White runic text scrolled across his retinas. He blinked at the jagged symbol on the lens display – the Nostraman hieroglyph meaning brotherhood. A muted click signalled the opening of a vox-channel.
‘This is Talos.’
‘Speak, Soul Hunter,’ growled the Exalted.
‘The assassin has broken. Set course for the Uriah System. Her temple is on the world most distant from the sun. I have the coordinates.’
‘We have been chasing this ghost for decades, Talos. The Legion has hurled itself at temple after temple after temple, across a hundred systems. You are certain the hololithic is there?’
Talos looked down, his targeting reticule locking on to the motionless, tortured body, then the severed head on the blood-slick floor.
‘Summon the Legion, Exalted One. I’m certain it’s there.’
Some worlds, by ill-fortune or intent, fall far from the countless billions of trade routes and pilgrimages that shape the Imperium of Man, linking untold numbers of stars in an astral cobweb. These worlds may be forgotten or ignored, but are never truly unknown. Every secret is laid bare somewhere, even if only a single reference in an abandoned archive in distant Terra’s librariums.
Uriah was an unremarkable sun. It seemed notable only for the fact it scarcely burned bright enough to be called a star at all. The worlds turning around it in their measured, heavenly dance were all frost-locked spheres of eternal winter.
Above the third such world, a vessel fell into low orbit. It was a crenellated blade of darkened bronze and midnight blue, proudly displaying the skull insignia of the VIII Legion. It arrived alone, but did not remain that way for long.
Other vessels, warships all, tore holes in reality as they broke from the hell-space of the warp. Each bore the same insignia, each was armoured in the same colours – and each was an echo of a much finer age. The design of each warship was ancient, as if they’d burst from the Sea of Souls after travelling for millennia, rather than mere weeks.
Many of the warships were twisted, darkened, more brutish in aspect than their original architects had envisioned, but their lethal grandeur remained. As they came together, the fleet appeared to be something from ancestral memory, when humanity had reached out to rediscover the stars ten thousand years before.
Contact between the ships was hesitant. Greetings passed over crackling signals, many with tones of guarded reluctance. The Legion rarely gathered, and many of these captains were rivals. A hundred centuries of bloodshed, defeat, predation and pain made for short tempers and shorter alliances.
While warship commanders exchanged hails and veiled threats, the decks of every vessel came alive with preparation. Thousands upon thousands of warriors swore oaths of moment, machined armour into place and readied drop-pods and Thunderhawk gunships, as well as grievously rare teleport platforms.
The Night Lords Legion was going to war.
Proximity alarms wailed only once, when a Navy patrol fleet ghosted within range of auspex sensors. A single Endeavour-class cruiser, its hull resplendent in Imperial gold, sought to come about and break into the warp, seeking the only realistic route of escape. Its lesser escorts remained behind, seeking to slow any pursuit. Despite the gesture’s futility, every second the destroyers could buy for their retreating flagship was precious.
A single vessel broke from the Legion fleet formation, an agile strike cruiser bearing the name Excoriator. What followed was a massacre unworthy of record
within any Hall of Remembrance. Stunted torpedoes crashed against Excoriator’s void shields, as effective as broken glass raining against plasteel. In reply, precise lance strikes cut into the adamantium meat of the three Imperial escorts, bursting their thin shields in a heartbeat and scoring the metal skin beneath. A second volley, mere moments after the first, carved them apart in dispassionate surgery.
Excoriator’s shields briefly lit up again, kinetic pulses of light rippling across their surface as the cruiser glided through the debris.
With a shark’s silent pursuit, the Legion battleship loomed close behind the fleeing cruiser. With game desperation, the Imperial vessel unleashed its meagre weapons, batteries of plasma and solid shot spilling into the void, clashing as they dissipated across Excoriator’s shields.
The Legion warship returned fire, its lance strikes rupturing the patrol vessel’s shields with impunity. With the prey’s shields down, the predator didn’t leap upon its quarry with a hunger to destroy. Excoriator’s lances fell silent, and drew alongside the fleeing vessel. Instead of broadsides opening up and hammering the smaller ship into drifting scrap, the Legion warship disgorged boarding pods in an overwhelming wave. A dozen, spearing across space and digging into the vulnerable skin of the Imperial ship.
Excoriator didn’t wait. Its engines fired, and the great warship veered in a lumbering arc, heading back to the fleet waiting in orbit. Aboard the Imperial ship, over a hundred warriors of the Night Lords Legion went about the business of purging any crew too loyal or weak to be of use.
It took only three hours for the Endeavour-class patrol cruiser to pull into formation with the Legion ships, joining its might to theirs. It bore a new name, the Faithless Song, to go with its new allegiance.
The cold sun began to fade over the ice-rimed mountain range below the Legion’s geostationary coordinates. Night was falling on the surface, and at last, with all in readiness, a voice carried over the fleet’s communal vox-network. The words came in a dead language, spoken by no living soul outside the fractured brotherhood gathered here.
‘Acrius Toshallion. Jasith Raspatha vorvelliash kishall-kar.’
Treacheries of the Space Marines Page 18